How to Run a Bitcoin Full Node on Debian Linux

Running a Bitcoin full node means that your system will be able to validate Bitcoin transactions and blocks. The full node will serve a broad function by joining the network of Bitcoin nodes and helping to verify and update transaction information across the entire platform. The benefit of running your own full node is enhanced privacy, since your own transactions will not necessarily need to update to third party nodes, but can do so from your own.

Other benefits include the peace of mind of seeing from your full node that any of your recent transactions have been posted and validated. In other words, you do not need to rely on a third-party server to tell you about your transactions or Bitcoin balance. Aside from this, you are also benefitting Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network by contributing spare system resources to the cause of validating transactions and blocks for all users, a process central to the function of Bitcoin mining.

In this tutorial, we will go through the step by step instructions of installing and running a Bitcoin Full Node on a Debian Linux system. We will be running full node as command line only, without a graphical user interface.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to download latest version of Bitcoin Core
• How to start the Bitcoin full node daemon
• How to interact with the full node via bitcoin-cli command

Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions

Category	Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System	Debian Linux
Software	Bitcoin core
Other	Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions	# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Bitcoin Full Node Installation – step by step instructions

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Follow along with the steps below to get Bitcoin full node installed and running on Debian.

1. The first step is to download the latest version of Bitcoin Core from the official download page. Obviously make sure that you are downloading the linux version, and select your appropriate system architecture.

   

2. Change over to the Downloads directory and extract the contents of the tar file that was just downloaded:

   $ tar xvzf bitcoin-*.tar.gz
   

3. The next command will install the Bitcoin executables into the /usr/bin/local directory:

   $ sudo install -m 0755 -o root -g root -t /usr/local/bin bitcoin-*/bin/*
   

4. It is not explicitly necessary, but always a good idea to run the Bitcoin full node under a separate user. The following commands will create a new user called bitcoin_node and then log into that account:

   $ sudo adduser bitcoin_node
   $ sudo login bitcoin_node
   

   WARNING
   You can use your normal user account to run the Bitcoin full node instead of a dedicated user account, if you want, but it is unrecommended and against the official documentation to run the software as the root user.
5. We will now execute the following command to start the Bitcoin full node in daemon mode:
   

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   $ bitcoind -daemon
   Bitcoin Core starting
   

   Is it now running and will listen for commands.

Interacting With Bitcoin Full Node via bitcoin-cli Command

Now that the Bitcoin Full node is running, we can use the bitcoin-cli command to communicate with the server. Let’s see some example commands that we can use:

1. To see a list of options that can be used with the bitcoin-cli command, execute:

   $ bitcoin-cli help
   

   This will output a long list of options, some of which we will cover in the examples below.

2. Create a new wallet with the following command. In this example, we create a new wallet called testwallet:

   $ bitcoin-cli createwallet "testwallet"
   {
     "name": "testwallet"
   }
   

3. Load the wallet we just created or another one by specifying the name of it with the loadwallet option:

   $ bitcoin-cli loadwallet testwallet
   

4. Validate a Bitcoin address, which will reveal information such as the public key:

   $ bitcoin-cli validateaddress "bc1q09vm5lfy0j5reeulh4x5752q25uqqvz34hufdl"
   

5. Get various types of information, such as block chain info, network info, net totals, and wallet info, respectively:

   $ bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo
   $ bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo
   $ bitcoin-cli getnettotals
   $ bitcoin-cli getwalletinfo
   

6. Perform a transaction by sending a specified amount of Bitcoin to an address by using the sendtoaddress option. Then, specify the address next, and the amount that you want to send:

   $ bitcoin-cli sendtoaddress "[address]" [amount] "[comment]" "[comment_to]"
   

   Simply executing the command without further options will show a lot of helpful examples:

   $ bitcoin-cli sendtoaddress
   

   

Closing Thoughts

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In this tutorial, we saw how to run a Bitcoin Full Node on a Debian Linux system. For users that wish to enhance their privacy, this makes it so that our system will not have to communicate directly with third party servers in order to validate transactions. We can now handle this operation in house, meanwhile the full node will still synchronize to various other servers over the internet, as this is how the peer to peer network communicates and stays on the same page.